BACKGROUND In 2006, Massachusetts passed sweeping health care reform legislation aimed at improving access to health care for residents. This study investigates how this landmark legislation affected contraceptive access for low-income women. STUDY DESIGN This study included (a) 16 in-depth interviews with family planning providers, (b) 9 focus group discussions with 52 low-income English- an...

Missed appointments are an avoidable cost and resource inefficiency which impact upon the health of the patient and treatment outcomes. Health care services are increasingly utilizing reminder systems to manage these negative effects. This study explores the effectiveness of reminder systems for promoting attendance, cancellations, and rescheduling of appointments across all health care setting...

Background: Use of contrast agents (CAs) during CT simulation for treatment planing system leads to changes in  electron density. In this study we aimed to investigate the effect on  calculated dose of various concentrations of CAs on treatment planing systems in different dose calculation algorithms. Materials and Methods: Contrast agent (0.769 mg/ml Iopromid) - water mixtures at con...

In this research, a new method for market-product strategic planning is presented. In this method, an expert system is designed on the basis of identifying important factors that are effective in a firm and analyzing the logical relations between them. The objective is to develop a decision support system (DSS) for helping managers to make strategic decisions. DDS can serve as suitable replacem...

We consider the problem of appointment scheduling in a robust optimization framework. The appointment scheduling problem arises in many service operations, for example health care. For each job, we are given its minimum and maximum possible execution times. The objective is to find an appointment schedule for which the cost in the worst case scenario of the realization of the processing times o...

We describe a spoken language system that schedules appointments over the telephone. The system has a calendar of available times for some service that callers want to obtain. The system and the caller engage in a cooperative dialogue until a mutually satisfactory appointment time can be found and scheduled. The system has three parts: a speech recog-nizer based on neural network phoneme classi...

a new integrated model is developed for information systems planning. in this model, entitled hisspm, a combination of the strengths of critical success factors (csf) method, analytic hierarchy process (ahp) technique and genetic algorithms (ga) is used to identify and prioritize the required information systems. this model considers both qualitative and quantitative factors, as well as the imp...

Production planning and control (PPC) systems have to deal with rising complexity and dynamics. The complexity of planning tasks is due to some existing multiple variables and dynamic factors derived from uncertainties surrounding the PPC. Although literatures on exact scheduling algorithms, simulation approaches, and heuristic methods are extensive in production planning, they seem to be ineff...

Lack of patient adherence with eye appointments can decrease ocular outcomes. This prospective, randomized, single-blinded controlled study assessed the effectiveness of multiple interventions in improving follow-up adherence to recommended eye appointments. Patients due for follow-up appointments were randomly assigned to usual care, automated intervention, or personal intervention. Automated-...